View full sizeRichard Cockle/The Oregonian Fred Ziari takes a break beside the Columbia River in Eastern Oregon, with an irrigation pumping station in the background. Irrigation technology introduced by Ziari helps growers in Oregon and Washington save billions of gallons a year in water, along with the energy needed to pump and move it.

PENDLETON -- Fred Ziari interrupted a visit to a government official in the Persian Gulf emirate of Qatar last spring to use his iPhone to turn down the thermostat in his Hermiston office.

Sheik Hamad bin Ali-Thani was speechless. The sheik, a technology buff, is vice chairman of the emirate's food security program.

"He loved it, he just loved it," said a laughing Ziari, whose Oregon company, Onsmart LLC, developed the software that allowed him to access the thermostat.

Onsmart plans to begin marketing that technology next year. With it, consumers will be able to go online with smart phones and laptops and remotely control most of their home's electrical consumption.

"It puts them in charge of their home energy use," said the 56-year-old Ziari, contending that people can manage three-quarters of a typical home's electrical consumption by adjusting thermostats, water heaters and air conditioners.

"I refer to him as Fred Inc.," joked Ron Adams, dean of engineering at Oregon State University in Corvallis, who was with Ziari in Qatar and watched the demonstration with the sheik. "He is one of the most amazing entrepreneurs I know."

Ziari is no household name like Nike Chairman Phil Knight, but he's becoming increasingly well-known among the state's business and government types as a low-key, but innovative heavy hitter

Fred Ziari

Early years: Born in Ziar, an ancient Persian village in northern Iran, where his family has lived for 1,000 years and that became the source of their last name. His father was a farmer who produced 25 varieties of crops from cucumbers to beans and also developed irrigation technology.

Education: He immigrated to the U.S. at age 17, knowing nobody and speaking little English. He earned an agricultural engineering degree from Texas A&M, and in the late 1970s became a water-management researcher for Oregon State University.

Businesses: Ziari moved to Hermiston in 1982 and started his first company, IRZ Consulting, the following year. He's currently chief executive of IRZ Consulting, EZ Wireless and Onsmart LLC, employing about 30 people in offices in Hermiston and Portland.

Family: Ziari and his Portland-born wife, Annette, have six grown children.

Computer geek: Soft-spoken, upbeat and intensely patriotic, Ziari has an engineer's enthusiasm for computerized gadgets. He's seldom without a laptop, iPad or iPhone. His SUV is outfitted with a GPS unit.

Why Hermiston? He has a special affection for Oregon's Columbia Basin and the Hermiston area, with its high-intensity, irrigated agriculture and food processing industry. "Our farmers are very innovative -- they do trial and error. It's a perfect match for me," he says.

He runs his diverse empire from the arid watermelon and vineyard country around Hermiston, better known for the war chemicals stored at the Army's Umatilla Chemical Depot than for leading-edge advances in irrigation conservation and wireless technology.

A high-tech guru/philanthropist/family man/avid weekend golfer and world traveler -- Ziari was off to Israel last week with a business development delegation led by Gov. Ted Kulongoski -- he spends half of most weeks in Portland and the rest in Hermiston.

"He is really kind of a global thinker," said Marvin Kaiser, Portland State University's dean of the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences. "There's a creative spark in him. He's brimming with ideas and with energy. But his real commitment is to make the lives of Oregonians better."

Award-winning irrigation

Two decades ago, Ziari's creative genius began to emerge when his Hermiston-based company, IRZ Consulting, unveiled a revolutionary dryland irrigation technology for the Columbia River Basin.

Using satellites, computers, automated weather stations and aircraft-mounted scanners, the system monitors 300,000 acres of farmland, ensuring that crops don't get too much or too little water. Farmers check the data transmitted to their computers, then adjust the amount of water sprayed onto their crops. Basin growers in Oregon and Washington last year saved almost 10 billion gallons of water, plus 35 million kilowatt-hours of pumping power, Ziari said.

The technology earned him a special energy-innovation award in 1986 from U.S. Energy Secretary John Herrington.

Wi-Fi innovations

More recently, another Ziari company, EZ Wireless , created one of the world's largest Wi-Fi "wireless clouds." Spanning roughly 1,000 square miles of Umatilla and Morrow counties -- a rural area bigger than Seattle and its suburbs -- the system allows anybody with a PC or laptop to log onto the Internet as casually as if they were sitting down with a latte in Starbucks.

The wireless cloud -- it's too big to be termed a "hot spot," Ziari contends -- encompasses Hermiston, Irrigon, Stanfield, Umatilla, Boardman, Heppner and Echo, plus a vast farming region. It was designed to help emergency responders protect 83,000 residents in an accident or terrorist attack at the Umatilla Chemical Depot , west of Hermiston, where the Pentagon stores lethal war chemicals.

Evolving out of that, Ziari engineered an evacuation system for the region. It allows emergency workers to communicate, track an unfolding disaster on monitors linked to remote-controlled cameras and funnel people away from trouble by reversing traffic on local roads and Interstate 84.

The evacuation system was the focus of a German TV documentary and became a finalist in a 2007 Innovation in American Government Award by Harvard University's Ash Institute. It also received a 2006 award from the International Association of Chiefs of Police.

"There is a common thread in wireless technology in what he does," said Adams, "and he is able to take that in so many places. He is able to engage across so many markets."

Fighting world hunger

Six years ago, his life took a dramatic turn when he discovered just how many Oregon citizens go hungry.

"I was really shocked," said Ziari, who'd been raised in the peaceful Baha'i faith, which teaches that the Earth is one country and all people are its citizens. "It was something I should have known, but I didn't know."

At the same time he was energized by something said by the late Mother Teresa before her death as she ministered to the poor and sick of Calcutta: "She said, 'Do what is in front of you.' I felt like this was something that was in front of us."

He spent four months during 2004 talking to farmers and ranchers and organizing a nonprofit called Farmers Ending Hunger . It works in concert with the Oregon Food Bank. As a result, one farm alone donated 25 cows per month last year for hamburger. Another supplied 40 tons of potatoes per month, and 22 Willamette Valley farms contributed 250,000 pounds of food products.

"My hat is off to Fred," said John Burt , executive director of Farmers Ending Hunger, while directing a 12-person crew near Woodburn that was packing 100 tons of fresh, donated cauliflower onto semi-trucks bound for Seattle, Phoenix and points around Oregon.

"If we weren't doing this, the farmer would disc the field into the ground and the cauliflower would go to waste," Burt said.

Farmers Ending Hunger delivered slightly over 2 million pounds of food to the needy last year, Burt said. Most went to "working poor" families, and children consume probably 40 percent, he said.

Annie Herbert , spokeswoman for the Oregon Food Bank, said Farmers Against Hunger is among its top 10 food donors. "It's fresh food that's brought into our system," she said. "We consider it a significant contribution and very valuable."

Ziari, meanwhile, frets that each year brings roughly 135 million more people into the world, of whom up to 35,000 die of starvation each day.

"That's what really drives me," he said. "I have an obligation to give back, especially right now with the economy and unemployment. We are all in it together."

He believes the solution to world hunger lies "in more research and more technology and increased food production" and that Oregon's agricultural community offers a model for at least part of the global fight against hunger.

"Oregon farmers gladly are doing it -- giving a helping hand to our neighbors," he said.